


Impaled on Thorns

by Gehayi



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Animal Transformation, Codes of Honor, Fairy Tale Curses, Gen, Magical Creatures, Post-LWW, Revenge, Speculation, Spells & Enchantments, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-03
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-28 04:01:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10070492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gehayi/pseuds/Gehayi
Summary: The White Stag was sent to the Pevensies...but not by Aslan.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is for Ana Mardoll, who inspired this with her deconstruction of _The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe_ and _The Horse and His Boy_.
> 
> This also fills the Wild Card space on my Genprompt Bingo card. The prompt I chose here was "Spells and Geases."

Two weeks after they had returned to England, Edmund came to Susan, one of the Professor's books in his hand and his face very pale. "I've found out something," he said, "but I don't know that Peter or Lu could handle it."

Susan didn't question this, because it was true. Peter was treating England as a hard test from Aslan that he had to pass quickly before too much time elapsed back home. And Lucy was being relentlessly cheerful, singing and dancing and talking to trees as she would have at Cair Paravel, despite being so homesick that she could scarcely breathe. Susan hadn't said a word about it. Lucy needed to shout her defiance of fate, her belief that Aslan had not deserted them, and if that defiance and those prayers came out in the form of snatches of ballads and clumsy imitations of dances that her adult self had once performed with dryads...well, that was Lucy.

But everyone had a breaking point. If Edmund thought that this would break Lucy, it was serious.

"Follow me," she said, and led Edmund to a little-used corridor that ended in a somewhat dusty window seat. Settilng herself on one side of it and motioning Edmund to sit on the other, she said,"Now. Tell me. What's wrong?"

Edmund twisted the book in his hands. "You remember the White Stag?" He didn't wait for an answer. "On the day of the hunt, you asked why we were hunting one of our own subjects. The day before, too."

"Yes. And none of you listened to me." The memory was bitter.

"We should have done." He held up a hand as if to fend off the sharp words Susan was just barely suppressing. "I know. We wanted wishes. But that doesn't explain why we were hunting a Talking Animal instead of inviting him to the palace, holding a feast in his honor, and then asking for a wish or two politely."

Susan considered this. It did seem odd. "I didn't have a wish. What were you going to wish for?" Had she asked that of her siblings back in Narnia? She couldn't recall.

"I don't even remember," Edmund replied unhappily. "I've asked Peter and Lucy, and they don't remember their wishes, either. Rather strange, don't you think? We were so desperate to catch it, and we can't even think what wishes meant so much."

Susan studied Edmund's tense face. "What are you saying, Ed?"

"I don't think that Aslan is the one that sent us back. Not unless you believe that Aslan would have wanted us to hunt a Talking Beast, or that he would have had to trick us into leaving."

"No, he wouldn't," Susan said slowly. "We wouldn't have been happy if he'd asked us to go, but we would have done his will. And setting us against our own subjects--that's the sort of thing that the Witch did, hunting and capturing and killing Narnians. Besides, I don't think that he would have wanted all four thrones to be unoccupied again after only fourteen years. It wasn't as if any of us had children that could have inherited the kingdom.

"But if it wasn't Aslan," and she leaned toward Edmund, automatically brushing her black hair out of her eyes as she did so, "who did send it?"

"That's what I found in this book." Edmund glanced at her uneasily. "That Stag is known here, in this world. It shows up everywhere. But there's no mention of it giving wishes. Most stories talk about how its appearance signals drastic change.The start of a quest. The overthrow of someone's fortunes--or someone's kingdom. Death. In the Middle Ages, some people thought it symbolized Jesus." 

The sound Susan made at that was not quite a snort. 

For a moment, Susan could see the expression of a grown man who had just found an unwanted answer to a question superimposed on Edmund's ten-year-old face. "But the ancient Celts...they had a very different idea from everyone else. They didn't see the Stag as kind at all. They said it was a creature of the Other World--the world of ghosts and fairies. That it was an agent of a god...a nature god, I think. And that it only appeared when something sacred was being violated, or when a law or a code was broken."

Susan considered this. "Whose laws?" she said at last. "Whose code?"

"Not Aslan's. I think that's clear. But I thought we knew all the nature gods. Bacchus and Silenus live in Narnia! What god could possibly--"

"Tash," said Susan, her heart sinking. "The chief god of the Calormenes. He'd have reason to lash out at us, especially after Rabadash's humiliation at Anvard."

"Are you talking about Rabadash's defeat at the hands of Narnia and Archenland, or his being turned into a donkey?"

"Both." Susan paused for a moment, thinking. "And even before that, Aslan arranged it so that Lady Aravis would hear the news of Archenland's coming invasion and Prince Cor would bring the news to King Lune and to Narnia. It wasn't Humans versus Humans, but Humans against a god."

"A very _tricky_ god. After all, he arranged for Cor to be in the right place fourteen years before Rabadash's attack even happened."

Susan nodded. "I think that's what Tash decided--that if Aslan was going to use divine powers and enchantments and Aslan's chosen kings and queens were going to be deceitful instead of resisting openly, then Tash would see how we liked it when he did the same thing. So he sent the Stag...or something like it...and surrounded it with an enchantment that made hunting it absolutely irresistible."

"But then why didn't Aslan warn us?" Edmund said, punching his left thigh for emphasis.

"He _did_ , Ed." Weariness swept over Susan as she recalled that day. "Don't you remember that feeling of foreboding we all had at Lantern Waste? Don't you remember what I said? 'By my counsel, we shall return to our horses and follow this White Stag no further.' And instead Peter babbled some nonsense about how we had never given up doing anything since we were crowned--as if we hadn't had to countless times because of new information or changed circumstances!"

Edmund groaned. "And I said that I wouldn't stop searching for the cause of that foreboding feeling for the richest jewel in Narnia and the Lone Islands. In fact...by the Lion, we weren't even _talking_ right! No one in Narnia says things like 'therein I pray thee to have me excused.' We sounded like something out of--"

"Calormene poetry? The style spoken in Tashbaan?"

The two stared at each other in shock and dawning horror for a moment. Finally, Edmund shook himself all over and then said, "We have to get back. Immediately."

"How? The wardrobe isn't working any longer!" Susan fidgeted beneath Edmund's stare. "I may have checked it three or four times since coming back."

"Five or six for me. At least. I've explored the whole house looking for a magic door, too."

"So have I. From the attic to the furnace room. And there's nothing." Susan forced herself to say the dreadful thought that was tormenting her. "Maybe we _can't_ get back. Not on our own."

"Aslan wouldn't abandon--"

"Look," Susan said in exasperation, "this is like when a prince in a fairy tale won't give his last bite of food to a beggar and, because of that, rides into a thicket of thorns he can't escape from. The prince had a choice. He just chose wrong. Like us. _We_ chose wrong. We were given two warnings to turn back and we ignored them both. We were ensorcelled to hunt the Stag, but going on after we knew better? That was _us_. That was all us. And it doesn't matter how sorry we are now that we're trapped in the brambles. 

"I imagine we'll get out eventually; the princes who survive going wrong generally do. But I don't think it's going to be instant. It never is in the fairy tales."

Edmund patted her hand awkwardly. "Don't worry, Su. We'll get out of the bramble thicket eventually. Even the Professor says so. And then we can go home."

Susan thought of princes trapped in labyrinths of brambles and hanging from the briars surrounding the palace of Sleeping Beauty, imagining what it would be like to be isolated n a maze or impaled on a thorn for endless wastes of time. Even if they had survived such loneliness and anguish, they couldn't have gone back to being the people they were before the punishment started.

How different would they be after their exile ended? Or would they be forever gazing back at Narnia, unable to regard this now-strange world as anything but an inescapable prison?

Like Rabadash's body. He couldn't escape from his prison, either. And he, too, had to worry about transformation from which there was no escape.

 _But we didn't do anything!_ she thought fiercely. _Except for lying to escape from Tashbaan, and we had to do that or I would have been forced to marry! We didn't do anything to Rabadash--_

In her mind's eye, she saw what Lucy had later described--Rabadash's head swelling and elongating into a donkey's, his hands and fingers solidifying into hooves, his voice being stolen from him even as he screamed for mercy...and all of the Northeners present laughing at him.

Prisoners, even dishonorable ones, weren't supposed to be mocked.Anyone who saw a captive being tormented or ridiculed was supposed to beg their captor for mercy and offer to ransom them in the name of Aslan, treating the prisoner with the kindness and respect that Aslan himself had not received at the Stone Table...and should have. It was part of the knightly code in the North. With two brothers who were knights, Susan knew this code well.

...wasn't Tash a god that warriors prayed to?

_Edmund was right. We broke the code, all of us. Even the ones who weren't there. None of us beseeched Aslan afterward to change his mind._

_It all could have been avoided if Aslan had just shown Rabadash that he wasn't the enemy. But he didn't. And that angered Tash, and now we're being punished for it._

"Su?"

She blinked. Edmund was gazing at her with a very worried expression. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"I'm fine," she lied. "I don't think that we should tell Peter or Lucy, though." _Especially Lucy. What would it do to her to know that her laughing at Rabadash outraged a god?_ "And I don't think that I can stand to think about it for one more minute, either. Would you like to go outside and do something pointlessly childish, like racing?"

That earned her a hard stare. "You're taking this remarkably well."

"No. I'm not." She laughed a trifle hysterically. "I'm honestly not. But--" She clenched her fists. "There isn't anything we can do about it now, is there? Except go on,and hope that we'll make our way home someday, and find something to be happy about here."

"If we _can_ be happy outside of Narnia," Edmund muttered.

"I intend to," Susan retorted. "I may be trapped here, but I'm not going to let Tash take away _everything_."

If, that is, it was possible to be happy while impaled on thorns that you could not escape from.

She supposed she would have many, many years to find out.

And for the first time, she felt the stirrings of resentment against Aslan.

**Author's Note:**

> Edmund's descriptions of the White Stag are true. It appears in myths all over Europe, in India and in Japan, and medieval thinkers did regard it as symbolic of Jesus. In the Arthurian mythos, it is generally regarded as the elusive pursuit of faith or as an omen that one should begin a hard and noble quest. A white stag with a cross between its antlers is supposed to have appeared to the Roman soldier St. Eustace. 
> 
> The ancient Celts, however, regarded it as a perilous creature, sent to correct a fundamental violation of sacred or secular laws or codes. Generally, they believed it to be sent by Cernnunos, the horned god of life, fertility, animals/wild beasts, nature, wealth and the underworld. Since Cernnunos is often conflated with Satan in our world, it seemed appropriate for a god called "monster" and "demon" in the world of Narnia to be the one who sent the White Stag to the Pevensies.


End file.
